"It was my fault for misestimating the strength of the Germans, but if I hadn't insisted on building the Dreadnought, the stubborn old guys would have only widened the gap between us and the Germans! It is true that the Germans have made a technological breakthrough, but like all previous enemies of the Royal Navy, it is impossible to crush us with a little bit of advanced technology! Fisher did not back down in the slightest: "Napoleon built the Orient, and we immediately responded with the Warrior; The Russians built the Admiral, and we immediately fought back with the Shannon! The Royal Navy relies on Great Britain's shipbuilding capabilities, and we can implement any advanced concept in batches at once! As long as we maintain the speed of our navy's shipbuilding, it is impossible for anyone to overtake the Royal Navy! ”

"Enough! The Germans now have 6 dreadnoughts, 4 under construction, 4 to be started, and 2 armored cruisers like the Invincible class. And we have 1 dreadnought built now, 9 are under construction, 4 are planned to start, 3 are of the Invincible class, 2 are under construction, and 2 are planned to start, as long as the current speed of shipbuilding is maintained, by 1912 our number of new warships will catch up with and surpass the Germans!

Together with our original fleet, the strength is completely stronger than the Germans! Your navy always uses the German threat as an excuse, and treats the government finances as your own pockets, and sticks your hands in again and again, and our current finances are no longer able to fill your bottomless pit! Asquith flatly refused.

"One or two more dreadnoughts than the Germans will not ensure the final victory of the Royal Navy! If quantity cannot be guaranteed, then at least the quality must be guaranteed to be the best in the world. We can abandon the continued construction of battleships with 12-inch guns and compensate by directly building 4 super battleships with 13.5-inch guns. Fisher said that was the limit of his concessions.

However, this request was rejected by Asquith: "Impossible! The government's finances have reached the limit, and if it weren't for the willingness of Australia and New Zealand to help build two armored cruisers, I wouldn't have approved the current plan to build 6 capital ships! There will be no changes to next year's shipbuilding plan. This is my decision! ”

"You're going to ruin the Royal Navy!" Seeing that his concession was still denied, the angry Fisher gritted his teeth, and then turned to leave, and when he went out, the angry slamming of the door resounded throughout the Prime Minister's official residence, causing the staff who did not know the truth to poke their heads out to see what was happening, and then they found that the First Sea Minister, who was blue-faced, hurried away angrily.

Asquith, who was in the office at this time, was equally ugly. He had no intention of opposing the Royal Navy's shipbuilding, otherwise the shipbuilding plan of the six capital ships would not have been approved, but Fisher's unreasonable attitude also made him angry in his heart.

Fisher's simple departure made him angry, but he was also a little worried that Fisher would rely on the trust of His Majesty the King to use other means to give himself a disadvantage, but Asquith knew how Fisher had joined forces with the media who feared that the world would not be chaotic in order to build the ship.

"This old bastard will definitely continue to give me trouble." Asquith muttered, "Fortunately, he has many enemies in the Admiralty, and it seems that I need him to make some trouble, so that he will not be able to come and trouble me." ”

While the British were having problems with the construction of their navy, the Germans were also in a little trouble.

"Another accident?" Jochen heard the bad news from Tirpitz early in the morning: "What about the casualties? ”

"The casualties were not severe, only one person was killed and two were injured, and the damage to the ship was also very small. But after this trial, we decided that the risk factor was too high and was ready to abandon this trial. Tirpitz replied.

"No, I don't think you can give up, it's a very forward-looking idea. It is true that we now have hydraulic catapults and can take off reconnaissance planes directly from ships, but recovery has always been a big problem, and the recovery of seaplanes must be slowed down by the battleship and hoisted back to the ship with a crane. This wastes a lot of time.

For a mobile fleet on reconnaissance missions, losing speed and wasting time is a huge mistake. And seaplanes with pontoons fly slowly. Flexibility is also low, and your experiments will make it possible for ships to carry fighter jets with the same performance as the Army Air Corps, which will be able to drive and shoot down enemy reconnaissance aircraft. Jochen immediately rejects Tirpitz's tiyì.

With the increasing application of water reconnaissance aircraft, hydraulic catapults and other equipment in the navy, the navy has begun to slowly accept that these seemingly inconspicuous wooden shelves can indeed bring extremely high reconnaissance and observation efficiency. But the limitations of seaplanes also began to give rise to ideas within the Navy about whether warships could carry aircraft that would take off and land on the same routine as the Army Air Corps.

The British Navy had the largest fleet of cruisers in the world, so they could call on a much more powerful reconnaissance force than the German Navy, so the British were slow to react to this. On the contrary, the Americans are very interested in taking off planes from ships. It's just that since the United States did not have any available aircraft at this time, although there was such an idea, the progress has been stagnant. The German Navy was able to carry out the implementation, but the results were not satisfactory.

Due to the popularity of seaplanes in the German Navy, several airship carriers such as the Orchid were rerouted. It became a seaplane carrier, and this time the Lan once again became a platform for naval aviation technology tests. The rear of the hull was completely flattened and covered with a wide wooden slab more than a third of the length of the hull for the Army's Me-2 reconnaissance aircraft to take off and land.

The take-off test was a success, and the Germans did not take it for granted, as the British, that tilting the flight deck downwards would give the plane the gravity to glide downwards and increase the speed of the aircraft to help it take off. The length of the Lan's hull provides a platform nearly 50 meters long, enough for an aircraft like the Me-2 to take off.

But landing became the biggest problem, and it was impossible to rely on air resistance to stop the plane at a distance of 50 meters, and then the German Navy began to try various methods.

The first was to add brakes to the front landing gear of the Me-2, but the result was that the plane flipped over on the deck, and then hit the superstructure at the end of the platform, fortunately, the tail of the plane that flipped over first hit the building, plus the speed of the plane at this time was not fast, and the pilot also closed the throttle when landing, so it was only the pilot who was seriously injured.

Then the Navy began to install several hemp ropes on the platform to act as arresting cables, but these blocking cables fixed on the platform directly ripped off the rear fuselage of the aircraft during the test, and the wooden planks that fixed the blocking ropes were lifted out in one piece, and the front fuselage hit the superstructure again, and the pilot died on the spot.

This time, the fuselage structure was strengthened, and the fixed blocking cables were changed to two sections of sacks filled with sand, trying to hook several blocking cables through the tail hook of the aircraft, and then the plural sandbags used their own weight to drag the aircraft to slow down.

However, this is still useless, and the landing of aircraft on ships is a technology with a very high risk factor, and even in the 21st century, when the technical means are mature, the landing of carrier-based aircraft on aircraft carriers is still full of accidents.

Therefore, the method that the Navy came up with this time is theoretically quite reliable at this time, but in practice there is still a stubble, the plane only hooked a blocking cable when landing, and the weight of the two sandbags at both ends could not drag the plane at all, and the plane still hit the building headlong, and the pilot died on the spot, and the sandbags that were dragged were carried by the speed of the aircraft on the deck, and smashed the sandbags on the other blocking cables so that they scattered on the deck, and hit two unlucky eggs, fortunately, these sandbags only slid against the deck because of their weightThe unlucky man who was smashed was injured such as a broken leg, but the successive defeats and losses caused the Admiralty to retreat, and Tirpitz relayed this idea to Jochen.

When he first learned that the Navy was going to conduct a shore-based aircraft take-off and landing test, Jochen was quite happy, because this was two years earlier than the first take-off and landing operation completed by the American Eugene Erie from the cruiser Birmingham in history, and the Americans could succeed, but the Germans could not succeed?

However, it turned out that Jochen took it for granted, that an aircraft like the Me-2 was much heavier and much faster than Eugene's small aircraft with a single skeleton, and then it turned out that it was the way it was, and that being too advanced was a bad thing.

At this time, Yoheng began to regret a little that he didn't give them a hint at the beginning, if this hit the confidence of the navy, how could he not develop naval aviation forces in the future?

At the beginning, I thought that the navy would be able to accumulate some experience and learn some lessons by conducting such research on its own, and any technological progress would be accompanied by sacrifice, and the navy had not failed to drop a plane and died, so when the previous test failed, Yoheng only encouraged a few words and asked them to continue the test, but he didn't expect that now the Admiralty actually didn't want to do it, and this is a big trouble.

Of course, the plan proposed by itself said that if it is not done, it will not be carried out, and there is no way to make a difference, and the navy only wants to give up the conventional take-off and landing mode of aircraft, not to give up the better use of aviation power, so there is naturally an alternative.

"Your Majesty, the performance of our current aircraft is far superior to that of other countries, so we can convert the Me-4F into a seaplane, which still has good air combat capabilities. If we are worried that the recovery of the aircraft will slow down the fleet, we also have another way, use a catapult to directly eject the ordinary model of the Me-4F, and after performing a combat mission, it will break directly to the surface of the sea, and we only need to be responsible for rescuing the pilot. "Tirpitz clearly came prepared.

Jochen looked at Tirpitz with a little headache, who said that the German Navy was old-fashioned? The one-time use method of the British catapulting the Air Force fighter with a catapult in World War I and World War II and the idea of the Japanese water fighter in World War II have all been proposed, but these are all evil ways! (To be continued......)